A summary of Georges Poulet's "A Phenomenology of Reading"

Georges Poulet has been identified as a member of the so-called Geneva School of
critics, who have assimilated something of the Romantic tradition of Rousseau and the
historicism of the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey. For these
critics, literary criticism is itself literature, but it is not the solipsistic criticism of the
impressionists. Many of these critics, taking much from the phenomenological tradition
of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, argue that consciousness is always
consciousness of something. Poulet, in contrast, believes that a thought is also "simply a
thought." He is a Cartesian dualist; he acknowledges a subjectivity that exits in itself.
But it is possible to join one's consciousness with the author's as it is created in his
works. The book is an object by which two subjects--the consciousness of the author and
that of the reader--become one. The author reveals himself to us in us. In
Phenomenology of Reading, Poulet examines a number of other critics in his tradition,
and he posits the existence of some ineffable presence--some mental activity--that
cannot be captured in the objectivity of the book itself but hovers above it or invades the
reader.

At the same time, Poulet's Cartesian dualism leads him to consider the critics'
consciousness in some way free of total identity with the author's. The critic is not really
writing analyses; he is writing a criticism that is itself literature in an attempt to convey
his consciousness of his author's consciousness. His work, in turn, will be more than its
own objectivity when it also finds a reader and joins itself to that reader's consciousness.

The tradition in which Poulet works is in direct opposition to the analytical, objectivist
tradition of British and American criticism. Rather than regarding a work of art as a
completed object with some autonomy from its author, Poulet considers it an act of the
author, part of the process of the author's consciousness. Here are some of the main
tenets of his argument:

I. That all books are as dead objects until someone reads them.

II. Books are more than their objective reality: they are more than words on a page.

III. The reader becomes part of the inside of the book; the book becomes part of the
inside of the reader.

IV. As the subjective experience of the book enlarges, so the objective experience of the
book decreases.

V. The life inside the book gains its reality from the reader's consciousness. The images,
ideas, words lose their materiality; they exist as mental objects. "My thoughts are my
whores" suggests that the author's thoughts "sleep" with everyone else without ceasing to
belong to their author.

VI. Ideas exist. They pass from one mind to another.

A book is not only a book. "When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes over, a
self which thinks and feels for me" (1211). One must let the individual who wrote it
reveal himself to us in us.

A displacement of the reader by the work occurs. Author and reader come closer to a
common consciousness.

VII. This identity of consciousness enables the work to have a kind of immortality. It is
this response which criticism should aim for, not the objective non-involvement type so
often written. "Words in this type of criticism have attained a veritable power of
recreation; they are a sort of material entity, solid and three-dimensional. One must be
careful to not irradicate the subject altogether by abstracting it totally. If the critic does
this, "then criticism is no longer mimesis; it is the reduction of all literary forms to the
same level of insignificance" (1218).

VIII. Thus criticism oscillates between two possibilities: a union without

One goes not from the work to the psychology of the author, but rather to "a certain
power of organization, inherent in the work itself. . ." (1221). Through intuition the
reader is able to comprehend the author's consciousness at his most obscure. The reader
is always haunted by the hint of transcendence. The moment of forgetfulness of
objectivity, of self, leads to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING
Phenomenology is the study of phenomena in which ‘phenomena’ refers to things as they appear in
our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings of things have in our
experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the object of the
experience. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy which studies consciousness as a result of
human intuitive experience toward any object of their life. Phenomenology puts the intuitive
experience of phenomena as its basic of analysis and tries to find the essential features of
experience and the essence of what has been experienced by human beings.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was considered as the founding father of phenomenology. He was
the pupil of Franz Brentano (1837-1917) and Carl Stumpf (1848-1936). The main concept which
had given by Husserl was ‘intentionality’ which explains the relationship between mental acts and
external world. This term describes that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is
intentional. The way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the
world. He borrowed the term ‘intentionality’ from his mentor, the philosopher and psychologist,
Franz Brentano.

Every mental phenomena or psychological act is referring to a certain intentional object. The
intentional objects are the manifestation of psychological consciousness. This difference as being
an intentional object and an intentional object will distinguish the physical and psychological
activities. This argument is very important since the key point of experience is that it refers toward
an object. The consciousness gained from experience is the consciousness of an intentional object.

In this essay, I will try to elaborate some theories dealing with the phenomenology of reading in
which it tries to explain about how the readers gain meaning of a literary text. This theory is part of
the reader-centered approach where the reader is the one who fold the meaning of a text. Writing
as ‘grammata’–the writing form, printed form of literary or graphic mark of pages –is not the
accomplished fact of meaning. Writing as ‘grammata’ is the potential of meaning and it is
characterized as the phenomenological expectation of meaning and required to become the object
of he readers’ consciousness, literary text will only b the phenomenological expectation of meaning
of literary text. The act of reading is a mental process since the figure in the text will become
imaginative figures in the readers’ mind.

According to Georges Poulet (1902-1991) a literary text is the combination between author’s
consciousness and reader’s consciousness. Literary text is not only an object of a single subject but
it belongs to two subjects, the author and the reader. This means that meaning of a literary text
does not exist if it is only in a book without anybody reading it. The meaning of a literary text is
modified by the reader’s consciousness from the first meaning which is folded by the author’s
consciousness. He supported his argument further; that all books are as dead objects until someone
reads them. The book needs the reader’s consciousness to exist. The existence of a book is not only
in itself but also in the reader’s mind.

The reality of a literary text is gained from the reader’s consciousness. The way in which the reader
tries to create the reality is a mental activity. When a reader reads a literary text, the figure of
words, sentences, ideas, images of the text will become mental images in the reader’s mind. The
way the reader interpret a literary text is influenced by the reader’s consciousness which they gain
from their experiences. The interpretation of a reader will be different from others’ interpretation
in interpreting the same text because everyone has different experiences which also make them to
have different forms of consciousness. This difference also applied in the case that the reader would
also give different interpretation from the author since they do not share the same experience.

Wolfgang Iser (1926- ) proposed that an important idea of indeterminacy where inside a literary
text there are gaps and blanks which stimulate readers to construct meaning. Furthermore, he said
that literary text is two-sided which are phenomenological and neumenonical. The first side of the
literary text is that it is appear in the reader’s consciousness after the reader has the experience of
reading the literary text and in the other side; literary text brings meaning in itself. In
phenomenology, literary text brings in itself the guidelines, clues, specification, and cues to
actualize as maximum meaning by reading the text.

Iser described three main points of analysis in his essay ‘The reading Process: A Phenomenological
Approach’: the process of anticipation and retrospection, the consequent unfolding of a text as a
living event, and the resultant impression of lifelikeness and these points of analysis will explain
the relation between reader and text.

When a reader reads a literary text, the reader will reconstruct the world of the literary text by
relating every sentence in the text to make a reasonable meaning in the reader’s consciousness.
However, a reader cannot materialize the world in the literary text visually, he will visualize it in his
imagination. Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) was the one who gives theory that reading is the
concretization of meaning. Literary text is not autonomous in the meaning and it is not concrete, it
depends on the readers. He argued that the world presented in a literary text is constructed out
of intentionale Satzkorrelate (intentional sentence correlatives). Ingarden said that sentences
linked up in different ways to form more complex units of meaning that reveal a very varied
structure giving rise to such entities as a short story, a novel, a dialogue, a drama, etc.

While reading a literary text, a reader tries to relate a sentence to the next sentence. Through this
process, a reader is able to fill he gaps which occur between sentences. The sentences in a literary
text cannot fully concretize the visualization of the world in the literary text. In every literary text
there is always a gap which should be fulfilled by the reader. If the author gives he full picture in his
work, his work can be assume as a bad work of art since this kind of text will lead to boredom. The
reader should be given spaces in literary text where they can create the world in their imagination.
Their imagination is also part of their consciousness. Iser called the world presented after such act
as the virtual dimension of the text. What the reader imagining in the act of reading is only the
unwritten part of the text with the guidance of the written part. That is why if in a text there are no
elements of indeterminacy, there are no gaps and blanks to fill, the reader will not be able to use
their imagination to visualize the world in the literary text.

After reading a literary text, the meaning of the text will be absorbed by the reader’s memory and
when the reader re-reads the text, his interpretation of the same text might be different. This thing
happens because the reader already has the experience of the world in the literary text and it will
effect their expectation in the second reading. The reader will be able to anticipate the relationship
between ideas of the text and also there is a probability that the reader’s interpretation will be
different because a text has potential of multiplicity interpretation. Meaning of a text is
inexhaustible. The multi interpretation of a literary text will never exhaust its meaning. In the act
of reading, the reader will connect the time sequence in the text. It will help them to construct the
virtual dimension of the text. The process to build the virtual dimension of a text is a living process
since the reader should continually try to relate one phrase to another in the text.

The text brings the nature of disturbance toward the reader’s expectation and this will lead to
frustration of expectation of the reader. The disturbance can come in the flow of time sequence in
the text. The reader will create different visualization of the literary world in every act of reading.
The reader’s imagination will concretize this visualization by processing the information given in
the literary text. The process of concretization of the meaning of literary text will lead the reader to
form ‘gestalt’ of the text but ‘gestalt is not the true meaning of the literary text. ‘Gestalt’ is the result
of the colliding of reader’s mind and the literary text. ‘Gestalt’ is merely a configurative meaning of
the text.

The reader’s expectation upon the meaning of the literary text will lead them into illusion because
he world presented in the literary text is not the true reality. This illusion appears because in
interpreting a literary text, reader tend to restrict the polysemantics tendencies to have a valid form
of the visualization because according to Wolfgang Iser, the polysemantics nature and the illusion
making of the text are opposed factors. If the semantics factor of a text already fixed, then the
illusion will be complete.